Monthly Archives: August 2004

August 25th – Robert Masterson
Robert Masterson is an award-winning writer, editor and teacher who divides his time between New York and New Mexico. Masterson’s creative work has appeared in numerous publications including Blue Mesa Review, Tierra: Contemporary NM Fiction, Tyounyi, The Temple and Bombay Gin. He has been a regular contributor to the magazines BRAVO, local flavor, Venting, and Albuquerque Monthly, his poetry and commentary has been broadcast on KUNM (public radio station, Albuquerque, New Mexico), WFUV (Fordham University) and WPKN (community radio station, Bridgeport, Connecticut). He is an editor-for-life and publisher with Lords of Language, a literary/arts organization based in New Mexico that has most recently published Voices Behind Bars, an anthology of women prison inmates’ writing, in conjunction with Sarah Lawrence College. And his collection of fiction and poetry, Artificial Rats & Electric Cats: Stories and Poems from Transitional China, is forthcoming in 2004 from Camber Press, New York. (host – Faith)

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August 18th, 2004 – NGOMANgoma is a performance poet, multi-instrumentalist, singer/songwriter and paradigm shifter, who for over 30 years has used culture as a tool to raise sociopolitical and spiritual consciousness through work that encourages critical thought. A former member of the SPIRIT HOUSE MOVERS AND PLAYERS with Amiri Baraka and the Contemporary Freedom Song Duo, SERIOUS BIZNESS, Ngoma weaves poetry and song that raises contradictions and searches for a solution for a just and peaceful world. Ngoma was the Prop Slam winner of the 1997 National Poetry Slam Competition in Middletown, CT and has been published in AFRICAN VOICES MAGAZINE, LONG SHOT ANTHOLOGY, THE UNDERWOOD REVIEW, SIGNIFYIN’ HARLEM REVIEW, and ‘BUM RUSH THE PAGE / DEF POETRY JAM ANTHOLOGY. He was featured in the PBS Spoken Word Documentary, “The Apro-Poets” with Allen Ginsberg. Ngoma’s weekly open mic series at The Sugar Shack in Harlem was voted by the VILLAGE VOICE as being “the best spot for poetry in NYC for the year 2000.” He has hosted the slam at the Dr. Martin Luther King Festival of Social and Environmental Justice Festival (Yale University-New Haven, CT) for the past 8 years. His newest CD release, “Ngoma’s Take Out (Smokin’ Spoken Word Cuisine w/Jazz-Funk-Fusion)” and his CD Movie Documentary Ngoma:Alive and In Your Face from NYC, takes Jazz/Funk/Fusion and the Spoken Word to the next level. His CD “Digitation:Solo Didgeridoo Musik for Meditation” and “Ancient Future Meditational Musik” are must haves for those interested in altered states of consciousness. (host – Alice-Anne)

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August 11th, Vivian ShipleyVivian Shipley — editor of Connecticut Review, is the Connecticut State University Distinguished Professor. In 2001, she won the Robert Frost Foundation Poetry Prize, and the Daniel Varoujan Prize from the New England Poetry Club. In 2000, she won the Marble Faun Award for Poetry from the William Faulkner Society, the Thin Air Magazine Poetry Prize from Northern Arizona University and was named Faculty Scholar at Southern Connecticut State University where she teaches creative writing. She also won the Lucille Medwick Award from The Poetry Society of America, the Ann Stanford Prize from the University of Southern California, the Reader’s Choice Award from Prairie Schooner, the Sonora Review Poetry Prize from the University of Arizona, the So To Speak Poetry Prize from George Mason University, the Elinor Benedict Poetry Prize from Passages North, the John Z. Bennett Award for Poetry from University of Southwest Louisiana, and the Hackney Literary Award for Poetry from Birmingham-Southern College. She has published nine books of poetry including How Many Stones?, winner of the Devil’s Millhopper Contest (University of South Carolina-Aiken, 1998), Crazy Quilt, a 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize Finalist (Hanover Press, 1999), Fair Haven (Negative Capability Press, 2000), which was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize, Echo and Anger, Still (Southeastern Louisiana University Press, 2000) and Down of Hawk (Sow’s Ear Press, 2001). (host – Peter)

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Kevin Matthew Gianniconsiders himself a brave poet. In the world of poetics where meaning is usually muddled in word puzzles–and as hard to find as a vegan in a slaughterhouse–his style describes the complexity of experience in the simplest of images and words. His poems deal with everyday life and love and the moments that evoke true human emotion–leaving the duties of empty existential pondering to his contemporaries. He is currently working on his M.A. thesis (English) at Western Connecticut State University. He has self-published two chapbooks of original poems. (host – Cheryl)